You are a tourist on a weekend in the City. You enter the W4th Street Subway station with subway map in hand. On the first floor of this three level station the A, C & E trains arrive and leave. You are standing on a middle platform with trains coming and going to your left and to your right. The C&E trains come and leave on the track to your left and the express A train does the same on the track to your right. If you want the B, D, M or F you have to go down two flights of stairs and again for the direction you are heading it is F&M on the left and B& D on the right. [I won’t confuse you by stating that this only applies to the Downtown Brooklyn bound trains. The Uptown bound trains have their own story two platforms over.]
So there you are The Tourist, on a Sunday afternoon and you’ve just read the note/sign/announcement pinned up by the MTA that states: C won’t be running on this track today, it will be running on the track of A Express, which you sort of figure out is behind you. But while you are standing there reading all of this and checking it with your map, the D train flies by and comes to a screeching halt right in front of you on the C&E track. Not only is this train operating on a track two levels above which every sign in the station tells you is not possible, there is no sign telling you it is going to come here and where it is headed when it leaves here. Also, there is no sign telling you not to bother to go down two flights, because it won’t be there. So, there you stand with your map in hand. Had you gone below two tiers to wait for the F train, you would have not understood the announcement mumbled over the intercom that to arrive at the following stop on that route, you have to ride the F train all the way to Brooklyn and in Brooklyn, catch it back into the City to get out where you wanted to go originally. And by the way, the B train isn’t running at all today. The weekend is when repairs on the tracks and clean up is done and it is anybody’s guess what the reroutings are. Good luck with that!! And of course, everyone around you is coming and going like they know what’s up!
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You must be talking about 34th Street? Not 4th…..Its a HUGE Station….
Yes weekend repairs are the norm…..always ask someone; don’t be afraid to do that…the people in NYC are great and they WILL help you. Also, you can always walk upstairs and ask a transit worker in the booth……..
..talking about W 4th street indeed. The message behind the post is that as a tourist, one does not know to check the MTA webpage for updates, or as in the W 4th St station there is no booth on the 8th Street side if that is where one has entered the station. People in the City are terrific about offering help, but the tourist I saw in confusion was left standing alone on a platform, because everyone else had boarded the coming and going trains.